The incriminating bits have since been washed from the Web, but Engadget and The Register managed to snag details about the Intel 330 SSD line before they disappeared. Apparently, they'll rock 6Gbps SATA 3.0 transfer speeds and sequential read/write at 500MBps/450MBps, respectively, while being built around the 25nm NAND found in Intel 320 SSDs.

That's nice, but what about pricing and availability? Amazon UK's listing said the parts would be available on Friday, April 13 -- oooh, spooky! -- while U.S. retailer SabrePC offered up Stateside price points: $90 for 60GB, $150 for 120GB, and $235 for 180GB. That's not quite the mythical $1/GB point, but it's not too far off. Keep your fingers crossed that the details stay firm between now and the launch day.

Comments

I don't see why the 180GB drive is so much compared to the 120GB drive. The middle option has the best price-per-gigabyte ratio. I definitely wouldn't shell out an additional $85 (a little over half the price) for an additional 60GB (a 50% increase in capacity). A price of $220 would make a little more sense to me. Maybe I'm splitting hairs.

I just installed an OCZ 60GB drive as my boot drive. I love it. Got it for $60, and recently I saw it on sale for $55. Go figure. I agree with Stradric, especially in older laptops that are already maxed out with RAM at 2-4GB, go SSD and it will run like a new machine.

The first drive I ordered was bad, so I had this one swapped out for another. The new one works fine and has the same warranty as a HDD. I have seen drives last 5+ years, and I have seen them last one day or arrive DOA. No brand is going to have a perfect product line. But I did appreciate the ease of the RMA process with OCZ. I am also looking into replacing my optical disc drive with the 500GB 7200 RPM drive I had before this. I love being able to customize my machine like this.

Been running my 6 OCZ Vertex 2's for over a year and have not had a single problem with any one of them. These are used in PCs, Macs, desktops and Laptops. Speaking of which if a person is concerned about storage space on a laptop. If they don't mind losing the optical drive, there are adapters that lets you replace the optical drive for a HDD caddy.

Online reviews/complaints need to be taken with a grain of salt, after all most people will not spend time praising something when it works. It's when it doesn't work is when people are more likely to spout off.

The reason you got it for that price is because OCZ SSD's have a very high failure rate after 3-5 months of usage. Don't believe me? Check all the consistent bad reviews online for a wide variety of their drives.

By reading several hundred complaints at the OCZ forum as well as user comments at Newegg, we begin to see the pattern for failures

Failure usually occur when updating the firmware or are failures out of the box like the Vertex plus (Value Series)

By avoiding any helpful tips from OCZ, you can generally avoid failures

A Vertex 1 or Vertex 2 can be thrashed daily by doing everything OCZ tells you not to do without a single failure

You can run Windows XP
You can defrag the drive
You can ignore the advice to offset the partition for XP drives
etc, etc....

but as soon as you update the firmware....

Hello, OCZ?
We have a problem

I have torture tested both Vertex 1's and 2's without failures and although my test methods might reduced the performance of a non-optimized Vertex, none of these tests have ever killed a single drive as firmware updates quite often do on these models (Vertex 1 and 2)

I haven't studied Vertex 3 failures however and have no comment for that model

That's pretty much where prices are right now. I just snagged a samsung 128GB SSD for $150 from newegg. Shortly after the purchase, I found a Crucial 120GB one for under $150. Granted, these are sale prices.

Either way, it's totally worth it. I used to tell people that more RAM was the best upgrade you could buy. While that's still true if you're under 2GB, an SSD is still an amazing upgrade.